MoMA’s new frame: A New York City landmark gets a makeover

With today’s reopening of the Museum of Modern Art after a four-month closure, one of the world’s great collections spreads west, its gallery space increasing by 30%.

Bigger is better. The museum needed to accommodate growing crowds of 3 million a year, natives and visitors who flock to take in beautiful and provocative canvases, photographs and objects.

Advertisement

But it’s not just new space; it’s space reimagined and treasures rearranged, in the best modernist tradition.

It’s terrific that Monet’s “Water Lilies” series has its own room. The green helicopter, which was thick with dust, has been cleaned. Director Glenn Lowry told us that it required erecting a scaffold, which hadn’t been done in a decade.

Advertisement

Now some art criticism: Since Picasso’s “Guernica” was sent to Spain in 1981, van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” has been MoMA’s pièce de résistance, even gracing membership cards of 100,000-plus art lovers. Lowry says it’s coming off the cards and is no longer the center of its gallery. We’ll see how that fares with the thousands who come to take selfies.

We’re sorry the bright red Ferrari Formula 1 race car isn’t hugging the wall anymore. Nor are three iconic works chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities for its Picturing America project to bring exemplary art to every classroom in the nation. Charles Sheeler’s “American Landscape,” Romare Bearden’s “The Dove,” and Edward Hopper’s “House by the Railroad,” the first painting MoMA acquired, cannot now be seen.